Where are we?: The garbage bag

Saturday, December 3, 2011

The garbage bag

In a moto rickshaw on our way out of Ahmedabad to the Adalaj Vav, a famously beautiful step-well which – no one seems to know – will be closed when we arrive.

Suddenly our driver pulls to the edge of the Nehru Bridge mid-distance over the wide Sabarmati River, reaches to the floor, pulls up a bag of garbage, steps to the bridge edge, tosses it into river, steps back into the rickshaw and drives off. We are speechless.

Sometimes one or the other of us has questioned people for such acts; we have even berated a few, to the puzzlement, astonishment or quiet cheering of others nearby.

Today, though, we are speechless.

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Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.